Park City • Filmmaker Cole Webley says he grew up in Washington state, but “I’ve been a Utah native for 20 years.” Premiering his first movie Thursday at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, which he mostly shot in Utah, “was worth the wait.”
Webley’s drama, “Omaha,” got enthusiastic applause as the closing credits rolled Thursday afternoon at The Ray theatre in Park City.
The movie follows a Nevada dad (John Magaro) who wakes his two children up early one morning and tells them they’re going on a road trip to Nebraska. The younger child, Charlie (Wyatt Solis), thinks it’s a big adventure, but the older child, 9-year-old Ella (Molly Belle Wright), starts to realize something’s wrong.
About 20 days out of what Webley said was a 27-day shooting schedule took place in Utah, often on isolated highways and roadside motels. It’s the only feature in this year’s festival shot in Utah.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) The main cast of "Omaha" — from left, Molly Belle Wright, John Magaro and Wyatt Solis — on the red carpet for the movie's premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, at The Ray theater in Park City, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025.
“The movie wouldn’t be what it is without the performances of these little monkeys,” Webley said at the post-premiere Q&A, pointing to Wright and Solis.
For the young actors, Thursday’s premiere was the first time they had seen the movie.
“I think the movie was really, really good,” Solis, age 6, said.
Wright said her favorite part of the movie was “to be able to be with my friends and be able to spend time with them.”
Webley’s path toward making “Omaha,” he said, started at Sundance in 2020, when he attended the premiere of director-writer Robert Machoian’s drama “The Killing of Two Lovers.” Machoian, a professor of photography at Brigham Young University, shot that movie on a miniscule budget in tiny Kanosh, Utah.
“I thought, ‘That guy lives in Utah, too — how do I not know him?’,” Webley said.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Director Cole Webley on the red carpet before the Sundance premiere of the made-in-Utah movie "Omaha," at The Ray Theatre in Park City, on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025.
Webley got in touch with Machoian, and they started collaborating on a screenplay. When that hit a snag, Webley said, “I grabbed him by the lapels, I threw him against the wall, and I said, ‘Do you have any other scripts?’ Metaphorically.”
Machoian pulled out the script for “Omaha,” which he wrote when he had just finished grad school, when he, his wife and their six kids “were super poor.” Machoian said he heard a news story about another parent in desperate circumstances — the details of which became the backbone of the movie’s plot — and started writing.
Webley said there was no doubt he had to make this script. “We knew that this was a special story that had to be told,” he said.
Magaro, who starred in the 2023 Sundance hit “Past Lives,” said working with Wright and Solis “made my job a lot easier. It’s a tall order to cast kids the same age [as the characters], and they really both rose to the challenge.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Robert Machoian on the red carpet before the Sundance premiere of the made-in-Utah movie "Omaha," which he wrote, at The Ray Theatre in Park City, on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025.
Magaro noted that he, Webley, Machoian and several other crew members are themselves fathers, so “there was a care for the kids, and an understanding of how to make it a fun experience, but also get the best out of them,” he said.
Webley, who noted that child-labor laws kept Solis to three hours a day on set and Wright to four hours a day, said that “it was important to me that these kids could look back with this movie and have memories to last forever and then, secondary, that we made a good movie. I think we did both.”
“Omaha” will screen again at the festival on Friday, 9:30 p.m., at the Redstone Cinemas in Park City, Saturday, 9 p.m., at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City; and Thursday, 12:30 p.m., again at the Redstone. It also will be available online, on the festival’s streaming platform, starting Thursday and through Sunday, Feb. 2.
